The Visioning by Susan Glaspell

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Something was wrong with the world and he could not see that improving a
rifle was going to go very far toward setting it right.

And there was springing up within him, even in his loneliness and gloom,
a passion to be doing something that would help set it right.

An older officer with whom he had been talking that day had spoken
lovingly of his father, under whom he had served; spoken of his hardihood
and integrity, his manliness and soldierliness. As he thought of it now
it seemed to him that just because he _was_ his father's son--had in him
the blood of the soldier--he should help fight the real battles of the
day--the long stern battles of peace.

His father had served, faithfully and well. He, too, would like to serve.
But yesterday's needs were not to-day's needs, nor were the methods of
yesterday desirable, even possible, for to-day. What could be farther
from serving one's own day than rendering to it the dead forms of what
had been the real service to a day gone by?

There came a curious thought that to give up the things of war might be
the only way to save the things that war had left him. That perhaps he
could only transmit his heritage by recasting the form of giving.

Looking out across the miles of the city's roofs, hearing the rumble of
the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to
and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer
needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from
softness and degeneration. Thinking of the problems of that very city, it
seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight for, no
stimulus to manhood.

Men and women! Those men and women passing back and forth and all the
millions of their kind, they were what counted. The things that
mattered to them were the things that mattered. Their needs the things
to fight for.

So he reflected and drifted, brushing now this, now that, in thought
and fancy.

Weary--lonely--he dreamed a dream, dream such as the weary and the lonely
have dreamed before, will dream again. Too utterly alone, he dreamed he
was not alone. Heart-hungry, he dreamed of love. He dreamed of Ann. He
had dreamed of her before, would dream of her again. Dream of her, if for
nothing else, because he knew she had dreamed of love; because she made
him know that it was there, because, unreasoningly, she made him hope.

Her face that night at the dance--that night in the boat, when they had
talked almost not at all, had seemed to feel no need for talking--things
remembered blended with things desired until it seemed he could feel her
hair brush his face, feel her breath upon his cheek, her arms about his
neck--vivid as if given by memories instead of wooed from dreams.

But the benign dream became torturing vision--vision of Ann with hands
held out to him--going down--her wonderful eyes fearful with terror.

It was that which dreaming held for him.

And it seemed that he--he and his kind--all of those who stood for the
things not real were the thing beating Ann down.

Dreams gone and vision mercifully falling away there came a yearning,
just a simple human yearning, to know where she was. He felt he could
bear anything if only he knew that she was safe.

The telephone rang. He supposed it was some of his friends--something
about the hour for dining.

He would not answer. Could not. Too sick of it all--too sore.

But it kept ringing, and, habit in the ascendency, he took down
the receiver.

It was not a man's voice. It was a woman's. A faint voice--he could
scarcely catch it.

And could with difficulty reply. He did not know the voice, it was too
faint, too far-away, but a suggestion in it made his own voice and hand
unsteady as he said: "Yes? What is it?"

"Is this--Captain Jones?"

The voice was stronger, clearer. His hand grew more unsteady.

"Yes," he replied in the best voice he could muster. "Yes--this is
Captain Jones. Who is it, please?"

There was a silence.

"Tell me, please," he managed to say. "Is it--?"

The voice came faintly back, "Why it's--Ann."

The keenest joy he had ever known swept through him. To be followed by
the most piercing fear. The voice was so faint--so unreal--what if it
were to die away and he would have no way to get it back!

It seemed he could not hold it. For an instant he was crazed with the
sense of powerlessness. He felt it must even then be slipping back into
the abyss from which it had emerged.

Then he fought. Got himself under command; sent his own voice full and
strong over the wire as if to give life to the voice it seemed must
fade away.

"Ann," he said firmly, authoritatively, "listen to me. No matter what
happens--no matter what's the matter--I've got something you must hear.
If we're cut off, call up again. Will you do that? Are you listening?"

"Yes," came Ann's voice, more sure.

"I've got to see you. You hear what I say? It's about Katie. You care a
little something for Katie, don't you, Ann?"

It was a sob rather than a voice came back to him.

"Then tell me where I can find you."

She hesitated.

"Tell me where you're living--or where I can find you. Now tell me the
truth, Ann. If you knew the condition Katie was in--"

She gave him an address on a street he did not know.

"Would you rather I came there? Or rather I meet you down town? Just as
you say. Only I _must_ see you tonight."

"I--I can't come down town. I'm sick."

His hand on the receiver tightened. His voice, which had been almost
harsh in its dominance, was different as he said: "Then I'll come
there--right away."

There was no reply, but he felt she was still there. "And, Ann," he said,
very low, and far from harshly, "I want to see you, too."

There was a little sob in which he faintly got "Good-bye."

He sank to a chair. His face was buried in his hands. It was several
minutes before he moved.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Children seemed to spring up from the sidewalk and descend from the roofs
as his cab, after a long trip through crowded streets with which three
months before he would have been totally unfamiliar, stopped at the
number Ann had given. All the way over he had been seeing children: dirty
children, pale-faced children, children munching at things and children
looking as though they had never had anything to munch at--children
playing and children crying--it seemed the children's part of town. The
men and women of tomorrow were growing up in a part of the city too
loathsome for the civilized man and woman of today to set foot in. He was
too filled with thought of Ann--the horror of its being where she
lived--to let the bigger thought of it brush him more than fleetingly,
but it did occur to him that there was still a frontier--and that the men
who could bring about smokeless cities--and odorless ones--would be
greater public servants than the men who had achieved smokeless powder.
Riding through that part of town it would scarcely suggest itself to any
one that what the country needed was more battleships.

The children still waited as he rang an inhospitable doorbell, as
interested in life as if life had been treating them well.

He had to ring again before a woman came to the door with a cup in her
hand which she was wiping on a greasy towel.

She looked very much as the bell had sounded.

She let him in to a place which it seemed might not be a bad field for
some of the army's boasted experts on sanitation. It was a place to make
one define civilization as a thing that reduces smell.

Several heads were stuck out of opening doors and with each opening
door a wave stole out from an unlovely life. Captain Wayneworth Jones,
U. S. Army, dressed for dining at a place where lives are better
protected against lives, was a strange center for those waves from
lives of struggle.

"She the girl that's sick?" the woman demanded in response to his inquiry
for Miss Forrest.

He replied that he feared she was ill and was told to go to the third
floor and turn to the right. It was the second door.

He hesitated, coloring.

"Would you be so kind as to tell her I am here? I think perhaps she may
prefer to see me--down here."

The woman stared, then laughed. She looked like an evil woman as she
laughed, but perhaps a laughing saint would look evil with two front
teeth gone.

"Well we ain't got no _parlor_ for the young ladies to see their
young men in," she said mockingly. "And if you climbed as many stairs
as I did--"

"I beg your pardon," said he, and started up the stairway.

On the second floor were more waves from lives of struggle. The matter
would be solemnly taken up in Congress if it were soldiers who were
housed in the ill-smelling place. Evidently Congress did not take women
and children and disabled civilians under the protecting wing of its
indignation.

Wet clothes were hanging down from the third floor. They fanned back and
forth the fumes of cabbage and grease. He grew sick, not at the thing
itself, but at thought of its being where he was to find Ann.

Though the fact that he was to find her made all the rest of it--the fact
that people lived that way--even the fact of her living that way--things
that mattered but dimly.

As he looked at the woman in greasy wrapper who was shaking out the wet
clothes he had a sudden mocking picture of Ann as she had been that night
at the dance.

The woman's manner in staring at him as he knocked at Ann's door
infuriated him.

But when the door was opened--by Ann--he instantly forgot all outside.

He closed the door and stood leaning against it, looking at her. For the
moment that was all that mattered. And in that moment he knew how much it
mattered--had mattered all along. Even how Ann looked was for the moment
of small consequence in comparison with the fact that Ann was there.

But he saw that she was indeed ill--worn--feverish.

"You are not well," were his first words, gently spoken.

She shook her head, her eyes brimming over.

He looked about the room. It was evident she had been lying on the bed.

"I want you to lie down," he said, his voice gentle as a woman's to a
child. "You know you don't mind me. I come as one of the family."

He helped her back to the bed; smoothed her pillow; covered her with the
miserable spread.

Ann hid her face in the pillow, sobbing.

He pulled up the one chair the room afforded, laid his hand upon her
hair, and waited. His face was white, his lips trembling.

"It's all over now," he murmured at last. "It's all over now."

She shook her head and sobbed afresh.

His heart grew cold. What did she mean? A fear more awful than any which
had ever presented itself shot through him. But she raised her head and
as she looked at him he knew that whatever she meant it was not that.

"What is it about Katie?" she whispered.

"Why, Ann, can't you guess what it is about Katie? Didn't you know what
Katie must suffer in your leaving like that?"

"I left so she wouldn't have to suffer."

"Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us--" But as, looking into
her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.

She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright,
her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the
marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear.

_Fear_--that thing so invaluable in building character.

Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: "Ann--how could you!"

"Why I thought I was doing right," she murmured. "I thought I was
being kind."

He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.

"But how could you think that?" he pressed. "Not that it matters now--but
I don't see how you could."

She looked at him strangely. "Do you--know?"

He nodded.

"Then don't you see? I left to make it easy for Katie."

He thought of Katie's summer. "Well your success in that direction was
not brilliant," he said with his old dryness.

Her eyes looked so hurt that he stroked her hand reassuringly, as he
would have stroked Worth's had he hurt him. And as he touched her--it
was a hot hand he touched--it struck him as absurd to be quibbling
about why she had gone. She was there. He had found her. That was all
that mattered.

He became more and more conscious of how much it mattered. He wanted to
draw her to him and tell her how much it mattered. But he did
not--dared not.

"And how did you happen to be so unkind as to call me up, Ann?" he asked
with a faint smile.

"I wanted--I wanted to hear about Katie. And I wanted"--her eyes had
filled, her chin was trembling--"I was lonesome. I wanted to hear
your voice."

His heart leaped. For the moment he was not able to keep the tenderness
from his look.

"And I knew you were there because I saw it in the paper. A woman brought
back some false hair to be exchanged--I sell false hair," said Ann, with
a wan little smile and unconsciously touching her own hair--"and what she
wanted exchanged--though we don't exchange it--was wrapped up in a
newspaper, and as I looked down at it I happened to see your name. Wasn't
that funny?"

"Very humorous," he replied, almost curtly.

"I had been sick all day--oh, for lots of days. But I was trying to keep
on. I had lost two other places by staying away for being sick--and I
didn't dare--just didn't dare--lose this one. You don't know how
_afraid_ you get--how frightened you are--when you're afraid you're
going to be sick."

The fear--sick fear that fear of sickness can bring--that was in her eyes
as she talked of it suddenly infuriated him. He did not know what or whom
he I was furious at--but it was on Ann it broke.

He rose, overturning his unsteady chair as he did so, and, seeking
command, looked from the window which looked down into a squalid court.
The wretchedness of the court whipped his rage. "Well for God's sake," he
burst forth, "what did you _do_ it for! Of all the unheard
of--outrageous--unpardonable--What did you _mean_"--turning savagely
upon her--"by selling false hair?"

"Why I sold false hair," said Ann, a little sullenly, "so I could live."

"Well, didn't you know," he demanded passionately, "that you could _live_
with _us_?"

She shook her head. "I didn't think I had any right to--after--what
happened."

He came back to her. "Ann," he asked gently, "haven't you a 'right
to'--if we want you to?"

She looked at him again in that strange way. "Are you sure--you know?"

"Very sure," he answered briefly.

"And do you mean to say you would want me--anyhow?" she whispered.

He turned away that she might not see how badly and in what sense he
wanted her. His whole sense of fitness--his training--was against her
seeing it then.

The pause, the way she was looking at him when he turned back to her,
made restraint more and more difficult. But suddenly she changed, her
face darkening as she said, smolderingly: "No--I'm not _that_ weak. If I
can't live--I'll _die_. Other people make a living! Other girls get
along! Katie would. Katie could do it."

She sat up; he could see the blood throbbing in her neck and at her
temples. She was gripping her hands. She looked so frail--so helpless.

"But Katie is strong, Ann," he said soothingly.

"Yes--in every way. And I'm not." She turned away, her face
twitching. "Why I seem to be just the kind of a person that has to be
taken care of!"

He did not deny it, filled with the longing to do it.

"It's--it's humiliating."

He would at one time have supposed that it would be, should be; would
have held to the idea that every man and woman ought be able to make a
living, that there was something wrong with them if they couldn't. But
not after the things he had seen that summer. The something wrong was
somewhere else.

"And yet you don't know," Ann was saying brokenly, "how hard it is. You
don't know--how many things there are."

She turned to him impetuously. "I want to tell you! Then maybe it will
go. I couldn't tell Katie. But I don't know--I don't know why--but I
could tell you anything."

He nodded, not clear-eyed, and took one of her hands and stroked it.

Her cheeks grew more red; her eyes glitteringly bright. "You see--it's
_men_--things like--that's what makes it hard for girls."

He pressed her hand more firmly, though his own was shaking.

"Katie told you--Katie must have told you about--the first of it--" She
faltered. He drew in his breath sharply and held it for an instant. "And
after that--" She turned upon him passionately. "_Do_ they know? _Does_
it make a difference?"

He did not get her meaning for an instant and when he did it brought the
color to his face; he had always been a man of great reserve. But Ann
seemed unconscious. This was the reality that realities make.

He shook his head. "No. You only imagine."

"No, I don't imagine. They pretend. Pretend they know."

He gritted his teeth. So those were the things she had had to meet!

"They lie," he said briefly. "Bluff." And for an instant he covered his
eyes with her hand.

"You see after--after that," she went on, "I couldn't go back to the
telephone office. I don't know that I can explain why--but it seemed the
one thing I couldn't do, so--oh I did several things--was in a store--and
then a girl got me on the stage--in the chorus of 'Daisey-Maisey.' I
thought perhaps I could be an actress, and that being in the chorus would
give me a chance."

She laughed bitterly. "There are lots of silly people in the world,
aren't there?" was her one comment on her mistake.

"That night--the last night--" she told it in convulsive little
jerks--"the manager said something to me. _He_ pretended. And when he saw
how frightened I was--and how I loathed him--it made him furious--and he
said things--vowed things--and he kissed me--and oh he was so
_terrible_--his face--his lips--"

She hid her face, rocking back and forth. He sat on the bed beside her,
put his arm around her as he would around Katie or Worth, holding her
tenderly, protectingly, soothingly, his own face white, biting his lips.

"He vowed things--he claimed--I knew I couldn't stay with the company. I
was even afraid to stay until it was over that night. I had a chance to
run away--Oh I was so _frightened_." She kept repeating--"I was so
_frightened_.

"I can't explain it--you'd have to see him--his _lips_--his thick, loose
awful lips!"

"Ann," he whispered. "Please, dear--don't talk about it--don't think
about it!"

"But I want it to go away! I don't want to be alone with it. I want
somebody to know. I want _you_ to know."

"All right," he murmured. "All right. I want to hear." His whole body was
set for pain he knew must come.

Ann's eyes were full of terror, that terror that lives after terror,
the anguish of terror remembered. "It's awful to be alone with awful
thoughts," she whispered. "To be shut in with something you're
afraid of."

"I know--I know," he soothed her. "But you're going to tell me. Tell
_me_. And then you'll never be alone with it again."

"I've been afraid so much," she went on sobbingly. "Alone so much--with
things that frightened me. That night I was alone. All alone. And afraid.
You see I went and went and went. Just to be getting _away_. And at last
I was out in the country. And then I was afraid of _that_. I went in
something that seemed to be a barn. Hid in some hay--"

He gripped her arm as if it were more than he could stand. His face was
colorless.

"I almost went crazy. Why I think I _did_ go crazy--with fear. Being
alone. Being afraid."

He looked away from her. It seemed unfair to her to let himself see her
like that--her face distorted--unlovely--in the memory of it.

"When it came daylight I went to sleep. And when I woke up--when I woke
up--" She was laughing and sobbing together and it was some time before
he could quiet her. "When I woke up another man was bending over me--an
old man--so _old_--so--

"Oh, I suppose it was just that he was surprised at finding me there. But
I thought--I hadn't got over the night before--

"So again I went. Just went. Just to get away. And that was when I saw it
was life I'd have to get away from. That there wasn't any place in it for
me. That it meant being alone. Afraid. That it was just _that_--those
thick awful lips--that old man's eyes--Oh no--no--not that!"

She was fighting it with her hands--trying to push it away. It took both
tenderness and sternness to quiet her.

"So I hurried on,"--she told it in hurried, desperate way, as if fearful
she would not get it all told and would be left alone with it. "To find
a way. A place. I just wanted to find the way--the place--before
anything else could happen. I thought all the people who looked at me
_knew_. I thought there was nothing else for me--I thought there was
something wrong with me--and when I remembered what I had wanted--I
hated--hated them.

"I saw water--a bridge. On the bridge I looked down. I was going to--but
I couldn't, because a man was looking up at me. I hated him, too." She
paused. "Though I've thought of it since. It was a queer look. I believe
that man _knew_. And wanted to help me.

"But I didn't want to be helped. Nothing could help. I just wanted to get
away--have it over. So I hurried on--across your Island--though I didn't
know--just looking for a place--a way. Just to have it all over."

She changed on that, relaxed. Her eyes closed. "To have it all over," she
repeated in a whisper. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Doesn't
that ever seem to you a beautiful thing?"

His eyes were wet. "Not any more," he whispered. "Not now."

"Then again I saw water--the other side of the Island." She went back to
it with an effort, exhausted. "I ran. I wanted to get there. Have it all
over--before anything else could happen. I couldn't _look_--but I kept
saying to myself it would only be a minute--only a minute--then it would
be all over--not so bad as having things happen--being alone--afraid--"

She shuddered--drew back--living it--realizing it. Her
visioning--realizing--had gone on beyond her words, beyond the events.
She was shuddering as if the water were actually closing over her. But
again she was called back by Katie's voice and that look he felt he
should not be seeing went as a faint smile formed on her lips. "Then
Katie. Katie calling to me. Dear Katie--pretending.

"I didn't want to go. I thought it was just something else. And oh how I
wanted to get it all over!" She sobbed. "But I saw it was a girl. Sick. I
wasn't able to help going--and then--Well, you know. Katie. How she
fooled me. And saved me."

She looked up at him, again the suggestion of a smile on her
colorless lips. "Was there ever anybody in the world so wonderful--so
funny--as Katie?

"But at first I couldn't believe in her. I thought it must be just
something else." She stopped, looking at him. "Why I think it wasn't till
after I met _you_ I felt sure it couldn't be--"

His arm about her tightened. He drew her closer to him. He was shaken by
a deep sob.

And so she rested, lax, murmuring about things that had happened,
sometimes smiling faintly as she recalled them. The terror had gone, as
if, as she had known, telling it to him had freed her. That twisted,
unlovely look which he had tried not to see, loving her too well to wish
to see it, had gone. She was worn, but lovely. She was resting. At peace.

And so many minutes passed when she would not speak--resting, rescued.
And then she would whisper of little things that had happened and smile a
little and seem to drift the farther into the harbor of security into
which she had come.

He saw that--exhausted, protected, comforted--she was going to fall
asleep. His heart was all tenderness for her as he held her, adoring her,
sorrowing over her, guarding her. "I haven't really slept all summer,"
she murmured at last, and after a few minutes her breathing told that
sleep had come.

But when, in trying to unfasten her collar--he longed to be doing some
little thing for her comfort--he took his hand from hers, she started up
in alarm and he had to put it back, reassuring her, telling her that she
was not alone, that nothing could ever harm her again.

An hour passed. And in that hour things which he would have believed
fixed loosened and fell. It was all shaken--the whole of his thinking. It
could never be the same again. Old things must go. New things come.

Watching Ann, yearning over her, sorrowing, adoring, he saw life as what
life had done to her. Saw it as the thing she had found.

He watched the curve of her mouth. Her beautiful bosom rising and falling
as she slept. The lovely line of her throat, the blood throbbing in her
throat, her long lashes upon her cheek, that loveliness--beauty--that
sweetness and tenderness--and _what it had met_. She, so exquisitely
fashioned for love--needful of it--so perfect--so infinitely to be
desired and cherished--and _what she had found_. He writhed under a
picture of that old man bending over her--of that other man--bully,
brute--thick awful lips snatching at her as a dog at meat. And then still
another man. That first man. Darrett. _His_ friend. _His_ sort. The man
who could so skillfully use the lure of love to rob life--

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